Machinima Museum Piece

Hi,

This was my first attempt on my own to produce a UT2004 short video. I found the experience to be really fun and enjoyable. I slapped on some music and really found my rhythm when creating the video. What I particularly enjoyed was getting the video the flow seamlessly. One of my pet hates is videos in games that change camera angles suddenly and glitch at bizarre points; I can safely say my video had none of these attributes.

First of all I decided to create an Egyptian level purely because there is a lot of static mesh and textures available for such a level. This would make creating the level fast and would only take a short amount of time so I could focus on the video. I spent 4-5 hours on the level creation and about the same for creating the video sequence.

I did not attempt to attach a storyline to the project as it would distract from the main interest of the video itself, but I did want there to be a sound track running through out. On my home PC I wanted to add the track form Moby’s album play entitled rushing, due to technical difficulties I ended up using one of the standard tracks in UT entitled KR-Ghosts-of-Anubis. This track in retrospect that works better than the one I had chosen because of the Egyptian them that runs through it.

One of the things that Brian and the rest of the team noticed about my video was it came across very samey. Although I agree the camera angles were similar for each exhibit I do think that it show cased my skills as a level creator and now machinimator.

For my next attempt I will defiantly mix up the shots and use the tools to really create a powerful piece. This is going to be the start of something great; I am really looking forward the rest of this module. I can’t wait to get some NPC interaction going on to really add even more to my Machinima skills.

Lewis Drinnan

Machinima Presentation Evaluation

Hi,

Here I am going to discuss how; the short Machinima presentation went, evaluate my performance and finally evaluate the group’s performance.

The entire group worked well together, we were quick to divide the work between each member and all group members produced sufficient research for the slides.
Peter and Mathew presented our presentation; I think it would have been more beneficial for the audience for Peter and Mathew to practice the presentation.
Although the presentation was “off-the-cuff” I think they did very well in conveying are research to the audience.

In retrospect I think are slides were a little inconsistent, they lacked cohesion. This was because each member produced the slides individually. Although we did vet each slide and made sure fonts, size and colour where the same we did not look at content. Two sides in particular had far too much written content for the audience to absorb.

One point raised in the group discussion was that some text was difficult to read because of the colour of the font. For my next presentation these will be a priority to get right.

Personally I think the grade we were given matched the effort we put in as a group.
I will be more accurate with my presentation in the future and make sure that all the little details are correct; this is the main reason why we did not achieve a higher grade.

Lewis Drinnan